


From the Casefiles of Edony Marguerite

by CountDorku



Category: Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (RPG)
Genre: Billy Sovereign (Mentioned), Birthday, Fluff, Funny, Gay Male Character, Gen, Heartwarming, Hijinks & Shenanigans, In which Edony is basically Tracer Bullet, Internal Monologue, Lesbian Character, Trans Female Character, Were-Creatures
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 20:27:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21398170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CountDorku/pseuds/CountDorku
Summary: In the overgrown post-industrial ruin of Old Molder, you can find the office of Edony Marguerite, the Magical Detective, who takes odd jobs in exchange for food and supplies.Here are some of the oddest.With very special thanks to the people who volunteered to help out as sensitivity readers.
Relationships: Edony Marguerite & Rinley Yatskaya
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	From the Casefiles of Edony Marguerite

The morning shower pattered off the window and the leaves in little bursts of water. On mornings like this, Old Molder is – not perfect, exactly, because imperfection is so much more interesting, but it’s at its best. The rain plucks a lot of the dirt and rust from the air, leaving it smelling fresh and clean for at least a few hours before the usual scents of the district ease their way back in, like a familiar but disobedient cat returning to the house to cause a little more trouble. 

My name is Edony Marguerite. I’m a private eye, and I’m nine years old.

At that moment, I was eating a hastily baked potato, the last of my supplies, with one hand and gently shooing an anomaly lizard out of my office with a broom held in the other. I was going to need some work, or it was back to mooching in Fortitude to get a half-decent meal. Fortitude’s nice and all, but it’s so wholesome; ninety percent of Fortitude’s crime consists of people borrowing gardening tools and forgetting to give them back. Only the rats get up to anything fun, and something about my condition seems to unnerve them, so they’re not exactly reliable employers. Maybe there was something I’d noted down in my best notebook I could follow up on.

I opened the drawer I keep it in, and instead of seeing a leather-bound notebook with the name corrected appropriately, I found an artist’s sketchpad, the kind you can get by the dozen in the Shopping District. The name written on it was almost illegible, but by squinting and cocking my head a bit, I was able to make out “S. Schwan”.

This didn’t add up. Seizhi could be pretty stupid sometimes, especially when Chuubo was involved, but he wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave such a clearly incriminating thing at the scene of the crime. Was someone trying to frame him for the theft…and, if so, who?

I pulled on my cloak of night, pulling it over my head to keep the rain off, and set out into the world. Someone out there had my notebook…and I intended to get it back.

***

Horizon is a sculpture garden of Gothic nonsense, Transylvania meets Victorian London in an elaborate display of foggier-than-thou. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they kept dry ice around to ensure there was an appropriately impenetrable fog on otherwise clear days. It’s ridiculous and overblown and despite my better judgment, a part of me loves it dearly – two parts, actually.

One, as a detective, this kind of mist-shrouded warren is like candy to me: a mystery around every corner, plenty of places to lie in wait, and the weird echoes make it easier to snoop (if only people didn’t keep tripping over me). Two, I have a condition where a big, hairy friend visits me, every full moon, and they fit in here like it’s a round hole and they’re the appropriate peg. I’ve lost count of the times the sun has come up, I’ve suddenly lost about ninety pounds of muscle and shaggy fur, and I’ve found myself somewhere in Horizon.

Today, however, spontaneous weight loss (and weight gain, for that matter) were not the issue, and I found myself exactly where in Horizon I needed to be: Casa Schwan. I’ve been around a few times, mostly because Laodemus is a buddy of mine: I’m not allowed to sign my own paperwork for a bunch of stuff (some oversight, clearly; just because I’m nine doesn’t mean I’m stupid), and Laodemus doesn’t mind filling out stuff like my School entrance papers. I’m not sure why he does it, but so far he’s been trustworthy. He’s also popped up a couple of times in my case work, but usually it’s turned out to be a misunderstanding.

I was lucky today, apparently. According to Melancholy, Seizhi was in today – sometimes he’s out in Fortitude, hanging out with Chuubo. Also, instead of a corpse being on the dining table (that had been an interesting day), there was a bowl of fruit, just the thing for a private investigator whose breakfast had been a hastily baked potato.

I had gotten rather distracted by a crisp, surprisingly juicy Granny Smith apple, so when Seizhi popped through the door, I swallowed a little too quickly. I won’t bore my audience by putting all the resultant hiccups in the conversation, but they were there, and absolutely did not help my Cool Detective Mystique. Don’t expect life to help you get the conversation you want.

“Edony!” Seizhi’s one of the good ones. Nice kid, bit of a sharp tongue but you can tell he doesn’t mean anything by it, bangs on about winning the big go-kart race a little too much but who’s counting, never tries to touch the ears. (I _ know _ the little round furry things are cute. _ Shut up about it _and stop trying to pet them.) He definitely took after his mother’s side, with the red hair and freckles, but like Laodemus, he’d inherited his father’s eyes; unlike Laodemus, who’s got abs like the School ourokompos crest and shows them off at the slightest provocation, Seizhi’s built low and vague and I don’t think I’ve even seen him out of a shirt when swimming. “How’s the gumshoe life treating you?”

“Work’s a little thin on the ground lately, Schwan,” I told him, between the hiccups. “The Russian cyber-mafia’s been running scared, and that’s been bad for my business. But I may have a lead on something…” I pulled out the sketchpad and dropped it on the table, being careful to avoid the spots where I’d dripped. (Look, the apple had been very juicy.) “I found this in my office, replacing my best notebook. Any idea how it might’ve got there?”

Seizhi examined the pad, his expression confused. “This is definitely mine, yeah. No idea how it would’ve made it into Old Molder; I lost it a couple of days ago. I’ve been learning how to draw comics – thought it’d make an interesting hobby.”

_ And I’m sure Chuubo being a comic fan has nothing to do with it _, I didn’t say. I was here on the job, and unless Seizhi wanted to pay me to fix his romantic woes for him, I wasn’t interested in trying. (Not that I’d want him to – at least, not until after a day or two without food. Matchmaking is more my friend Rinley’s bag, and even then, it usually leads to disaster. I’ve seen Rinley’s attempts to create a memorable first date for the happy couple end in three fires, two floods and one plague of geese. Oddly enough, her success rate isn’t actually as bad as you’d think.)

Instead, what I said was, “Anyone you think might have a motive to frame you for this?”

“Billy Sovereign, maybe, but he’s not exactly the subtle type. Unless you consider angry bulls to be subtle, I guess. If he wanted to hurt me, he wouldn’t try to frame me for stealing your notebook; he’d just beat me up or hang me from a basketball hoop by my pants.” He thought for a moment. “I will say one thing, though: when I went looking for it, where I thought I’d left it, I found one of Chuubo’s comics. I don’t remember borrowing it. You might want to check with him, see if he knows anything.”

“I’ll have a word with him, yeah,” I said, and stuffed a couple more bits of fruit into one of my pockets. As long as they were on offer, it’d be rude to refuse. Besides, it had been a while since that potato.

Seizhi held out the offending comic. “Would you mind taking this with you?”

***

Fortitude is weird. 

I don’t fit here. It’s nice. It’s homely. It’s kind. I’m sure I could find a place here, if I tried. But I don’t want to, because it’s _ too _ nice, _ too _ homely, _ too _ kind. It’s for people who want a life without an edge, a life with a minimum of fire and pain. And I understand that! I know what fire and pain are like. They’re not great. But I have a job to do, and even though I’m not sure what it is, I know, deep down, that I won’t be able to do it if I settle into Fortitude and spend the rest of my life fishing and gardening.

My hairy friend could also be a problem. It likes fish, naturally enough, and Fortitude really depends on its catch. It’d probably be a bad idea to eat it three nights per month; that’s the kind of rude behaviour that, no matter how nice and homely and kind the neighbourhood, is going to get the attention of the neighbourhood watch.

And just to cap off the problems with the neighbourhood, the Titov shrine is here, brooding on the horizon like Leonardo on a bad day, its crumbling buildings apparently held up through the same bleak determination that keeps the Titovs around. It’s creepy and awful and whenever I go near it, I get this urge to go inside. I’ve had more than one nightmare about what I might find if I did – nightmares of white hair and honeyed words and breaking glass. Keeping some distance is my best bet.

Luckily, Chuubo may not be the brightest, but he’s not stupid enough to hang out near the Titov shrine. I found him on the docks, the air thick with the scent of fish, where he had apparently just been released from a rather messy knot-tying mishap on one of the larger boats. He was limping slightly, and I could make out the faintest hint of rope burn on his left wrist.

“I’ll get it figured out eventually,” he said, brushing his wavy hair out of his eyes with his right hand. He was slap bang on the dividing line between willowy and gangly, and even in his civvies, he was wearing a tie, the one knot he could apparently manage. “How’s life treating you, Edony?”

“Not bad, kid,” I told him, pulling the comic out of the pocket on the inside of my cloak. I have to get a little creative with Chuubo, since getting his last name out of him was like trying to calm Rinley down. “Seizhi found this at his place. Hope you didn’t get too stressed out wondering about it.”

He took the comic, eyes wide. “Thanks, Edony! I was wondering where this got to. When I looked at its place in my collection, I found a bundle of Leo’s notes instead – I’m not sure how they got there.”

“I’ll go sweat him a bit,” I said, my voice as growly as I could manage. (I cannot manage much growliness. Being nine is a harsh mistress.)

“Don’t go too hard on him. I know he’s kind of a jerk, but he’s a good sort deep down.”

As I walked off, I could see him heading back toward Horizon, his limp having already recovered. The rabbit hole just kept getting deeper and deeper, and I realised I was eyeing the food stalls for “Eat Me” labels. It wasn’t just that I was still hungry. Luckily, one of the locals gave me a fish cake on the spur of the moment; never let it be said that I don’t appreciate generosity.

***

The rain had stopped, and the noonday sun blazed in the sky above, as I made my way back to Old Molder. An ornithopter floated overhead, riding on a thermal, shimmering like a coin in the water below a fountain. Luckily for me, my magic cloak soaks up both heat and cold, so the sun wasn’t too warm. Leo’s lab wasn’t far from my office, and I’ve been there before, so I trusted to my knowledge of the Web, a spider hunting the next morsel of truth.

Leonardo isn’t so much one of life’s oddities as he is the guy all of life’s other oddities think is odd. Tall, with dark hair and extremely light (some might say pallid) brown skin, the best way to get a mental image of the de Montreal experience is to imagine a cross between a ham-acting stage Dr Frankenstein and a bad-tempered, sleep-deprived raccoon. Dude needs a hug, a nap and a smack simultaneously. Creeps me out at night, though, when he goes as cold and calculating as a robot built from an iceberg. Then again, I’m pretty creepy myself a few nights a month, so I’m not really one to judge.

The lab was a brooding, half-decayed mess of scrap iron and unique plants, welds and patches of rust speckling it like scars from the battle against entropy. (Not that one.) Weird, half-living systems had been patched into its machinery over the years, making this possibly the only house in Old Molder that could up and quit and move to Horizon if there was another earthquake.

Like most of Old Molder, the main door was on the second level, linked to the rest of the district by the Web. I scuttled down the skinny, jagged walkway to bang on the door, and it creaked open.

“De Montreal,” I said as I walked in; I didn’t see much point waiting for an invitation. Then I spotted the girl sitting primly on Leonardo’s musty couch, her expression flat, writing in a notepad. “And Koutolika. How nice to see you.”

This was an unexpected wrinkle. Natalia was the coolest customer in Town, the kind of girl who’d save your life and verbally rip you to shreds without changing expression for either, and while it wasn’t unheard-of for her to end up involved in Leonardo’s research, it was pretty rare. I like her. Pale, dark-haired, with the wiry build of a knife fighter and eyes that could cut through you like just such a knife, it was common knowledge that Natalia had been through hell, and everyone’s got a theory as to how, although it’d take all the deviant scientists in Town to figure out which theory was right. Since she’s Russian, my bet’s on the cyber-mafia, but it’d be rude to pry – at least unless someone was paying me to.

I opted to focus my efforts on Leonardo. Getting a spontaneous reaction out of Natalia is usually like trying to saw a rock in half with a plush rabbit. She doesn’t even sweat on hot days if she doesn’t want to. Leonardo, on the other hand, resembles nothing so much as a lava cake made with blasting gelignite.

“So what are you two up to?” I opened, eyeing them with utmost skepticism. “Don’t often see you hanging out.”

Leonardo coughed and said, “We were, um, smooching.”

I chose to let the absurdity of that lie stand for itself, responding only with a raised eyebrow. He might as well have claimed they were practicing turning into giant snakes. Leonardo keeps his personal life in a childsafe bottle even he can’t figure out how to open; the idea of him making a move on Natalia was laughable. As for Natalia, well, this isn’t major league baseball; she’s not likely to switch teams, and the odds of her doing so for Leonardo – a man who has only ever willingly dated carbon-14 – were pretty slim.

Leonardo made a face like a lemon kicking itself. “Yes, yes, _ all right _.” He coughed again. “I had hoped to save this until I had a firmer grasp on the theoretical elements, but it seems I must publish or perish. Very well. I was aware that you intend to embark upon a course of testosterone suppressors at the appropriate time, and I began to wonder if the customary ones were compatible with your uniquely ursine therianthropic physiology. While my genius is of course incomparable, endocrinology is far from my area of expertise, so I sought out Natalia as a research assistant. It is possible they will react antagonistically, and I hope to develop a workaround before you commence.”

“Spare me your space-age technobabble, de Montreal,” I snarled. My snarls aren’t that great, except perhaps during full moon, but I’m working on it, and this one was pretty good, if I do say so myself. “Give it to me in layman’s terms or don’t give it to me at all.”

“He says that the full moon may cause problems with the puberty inhibitors you want to take,” translated Natalia wearily.

Okay, now that made sense.

“You’re worried that my hairy friend’s visits are going to mess with my meds when I get them?”

Leonardo’s eyes narrowed. “You call your transformation your ‘hairy friend’?”

“Not the point!” I was beginning to lose control of the situation, so I played my trump card. “Chuubo found some of your notes hidden in his comics collection. Any idea how they might have got there?”

They looked at each other and chorused, “Rinley.”

Yeah, that tracked.

***

Rinley Yatskaya. Friend, rival, nemesis, sometimes all three at once. Pure chaotic energy forged into the shape of a dark-haired kid with a strawberry flower crown. That Rinley, a force of unfettered mayhem, emerged from the sleepy, smoky confines of the Yatskaya shrine will never not be jarring; imagine opening the cutlery drawer and finding sections for knives, forks, spoons and chainsaws.

On the one hand, she and I are natural enemies. I’m a detective, she’s a troublemaker. I’m order, she’s chaos. I’m the law, or at least law-adjacent, she’s completely impervious to the rules. I spend my time looking for the truth, she spouts the wildest nonsense with a straight face. (At least, I hope that’s what’s happening. The alternative would be madness – according to Leo, anyway.)

On the other hand…she’s not actually that _ bad _ . She’s helped out on a few cases, and while she definitely made those cases more confusing than they probably needed to be, justice was done and the truth came out. It’s not even setting a thief to catch a thief; if Rinley was anything as mundane as a thief, Town would probably be a much less interesting place. Plus, sometimes you just need to pull something crazy, and _ nobody _ can do crazy like Rinley.

That said, this time, she was clearly the problem. It all fit. Okay, I didn’t have a motive, yet, but the rest of it fit. Okay, the means fit, and Rinley sort of makes her own opportunities.

The Yatskaya cats fled as I approached, apparently picking up my condition as I drew near, moving away from me in waves, like I’d tossed a pebble into a puddle made of fur. My nose wrinkled; I’d never liked the scent of the incense they burn, and it definitely wasn’t helping today.

One of the attendants – I recognised him from past investigations; his name was Nick Ross, and he had a thing for Hideyoshi Yatskaya he wasn’t great at hiding – told me that Rinley had been getting something set up in a house a few streets over, so I made my way there. I winced as I drew near; the door had glass set into it, and the mid-afternoon sun reflected off it into my eyes.

The door wasn’t locked, and I opened it cautiously, half-expecting a bucket of whitewash or some other prank. Rinley’s stunts are _ usually _ more elaborate than hokey vaudeville nonsense, but you never know with Rinley. She was standing there, apparently waiting for me, her face adorned with a diabolical smirk.

“Rinley Yatskaya!” I thundered dramatically, pointing. “It was you who stole my notebook!”

“That’s an interesting theory, Edony,” she said, pulling out a false moustache and twirling it. (She did not put it on. She was holding it in one hand and twirling it with the other. That this did not surprise me is all you need to know about Rinley.) “And what proof do you have?”

“Anyone might have stolen my notebook for what it contains,” I began, throwing my cloak back dramatically, “but none of them would attempt to leave such a trail of breadcrumbs. The Russian cyber-mafia wouldn’t even _ try _ to frame Seizhi.”

“All right, I confess, it was me,” she wailed melodramatically, before shifting back to the smirk. “It was all in order to lure you here, detective, so you would fall into my most diabolical trap…”

Someone popped up from behind and seized me in a painless but immovable grip, their hands like manacles, and another set of hands pulled something onto my head. I slipped a hand free and felt it.

It was made of cardboard, vaguely conical, with a length of cheap elastic going under my chin.

“…your birthday party!”

Oh yeah. Funny how you lose track of time. Time’s a bit weird here – it shifts and drips and moves like oobleck in a washing machine – and in all the excitement, I had completely forgotten what day it was.

As Chuubo, Seizhi, Leo, Natalia and a few other people I recognised from around Town began to filter into the room – Natalia had been the one to grab me, while Seizhi pulled on the hat, and Leonardo was carrying the cake with an expression of high dudgeon – I boggled. “You gave me a criminal conspiracy as a birthday present?” 

“Yep!” she beamed. “What do you think?”

I grabbed her in a hug. “Best present ever!”

***

The setting sun lit the sky aflame as I made my way back to my office, carrying a sack of food over my shoulder and my notebook under my arm. Another ornithopter glittered in the sky as I let myself in, golden wings flaring in the sunset.

My name is Edony Marguerite. I’m a private eye, and I’m ten years old.


End file.
